Immersion as shared imperative: entertainment of/in digital scholarship

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe modern culture of entertainment is performed across diverse practices and institutions – from Disney to gaming, Hollywood to tourism, museums to commercial consumption – and it prizes being physically and affectively ‘caught up’ in forms of play that transport participants away from everyday reality. Defined in immersive terms, entertainment is pervasive and ideologically compelling. This article explores an analogous relationship between this ubiquitous culture of entertainment and digital scholarship in the critical study of religion. The central case study is an ethnographic and archival project, Materializing the Bible, which examines the social life of scriptures, religious tourism, and processes of material religion. I argue that immersion is a shared imperative between this project of digital scholarship and the empirical phenomenon it seeks to understand. As a contribution to this special issue, the article illustrates how the affordances of working with a digital platform intersect with a theoretical commitment to better understand the relationship between religion and entertainment.